A few days ago, I mentioned that I wish I had a little video to show 5th graders to convince them to take Spanish when they get to CrossRoads.

Some of my kids were already on a video shoot when they caught wind of my wish, and this is what they produced, entirely on their own.

Kids, they’re too cool!

Click through to watch it in HD or hit the direct link.

Tagged with: crossroads • spanish
1 Comment »

Recently, I was asked to offer comments/ideas on a post by MagistraM. She gifted her newly 5 year-old daughter an iPod Nano. She specifically wants the device to be a source of learning for the child. I left her a fairly long comment, and I wanted to re-post it here for you to examine.

Here is my comment to her. I invite your thoughts.

I think I may be the lone dissenter here.

I think this is a question of attention and perception. Most children at that age do not have sufficient mental abilities (nor should they) to truly differentiate the two. That is to say, all too often, children at a young age do not know how to *not* follow all of the stimulus around them with their attention.

For example, you and I know how to ignore certain external stimuli, as well as distracting internal stimuli (i.e. thoughts) when we are concentrating on something else. Children do not. Often, attention and perception are not separate at such a young age. This is common, and not bad.

Children tend to learn this in the structured environment of school since school expects a child to not necessarily follow their attention everywhere it wants to go.

Also, I would argue that children at her age should be involved almost exclusively in imaginative play. It is in the context of re purposing everyday items into different items (i.e. the broom into a horse) that higher order cognitive abilities form at a young age. This is a crucial step that is often usurped by screen time.

Now I am terribly hypocritical of this, as I am working on a project and my girls are watching Dora. So I am not practicing what I preach as much as I ought, but nonetheless it is an arguable position.

So, is it bad to give her an iPod? No, not necessarily.

I guess the question becomes, it is a good thing?

I question that.

First, how much can she really learn at that age? Not a whole lot, I’d argue. The reason being, she does not have a sufficient set of cognitive schema through which to analyze new information. So, without a constructed lens through which to view new information, it will all seem a bit foreign.

Not only that, I suspect there isn’t much she *should* learn from an iPod at that age that she wouldn’t be better served by interacting with an adult.

Now, give her an iPod so she can listen to her music when she wants to? Sure.

But to give her an iPod because it is specifically a learning tool? Not so sure I buy that.

But then, it may just be me.

Chris

Tagged with: ipod for child • magistram
4 Comments »

Disclaimer: I do not claim to be able to write well, let alone in poetic form. But nonetheless, I had to craft a poem for a graduate class I am taking. The course is called Teaching Reading in the Content area and is designed to teach us how to support efforts to increase literacy in whatever content area we teach.

For an assignment, we had to select a poetic form and craft a poem summarizing three chapters of our textbook.

Here is my discussion board posting, reposted in its entirety for your “enjoyment”.

****

Ok so I have to admit this was easily the hardest assignment yet. Having to narrow down three chapters to such a small space was disheartening! There was so much information presented, but I wanted to be creative. After all, brevity is the soul of wit, right? I feel witless as opposed to witty after writing this, since it took *forever*. I erased, I changed, I summarized, etc.

I selected the poetic style of Lanternes. It is in the quintain family. Here are other examples to familiarize you with the genre.

The poem is supposed to form the shape of a Japanese lantern, and each line should stand on its own. A few more examples here.

So here is mine…

Tagged with: lanterne • poem • poetry
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From the Creative Commons Full FAQ:

Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license. You can stop distributing your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish; but this will not withdraw any copies of your work that already exist under a Creative Commons license from circulation, be they verbatim copies, copies included in collective works and/or adaptations of your work. So you need to think carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make sure that you are happy for people to be using your work consistent with the terms of the license, even if you later stop distributing your work.

I did not know that.

Tagged with: creative commons
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A quick prima facie review of a new smart pen, Papershow.

3 Comments »

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.7. I hope it worked!

Tagged with: wordpress
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After reading through Jen’s post on lecture capture from a staff perspective, I’ve been hit with it from a student perspective. There is a class that is required for my doctoral program and it is only taught once every two years. It’s coming in Spring.

It’s at 1:30 pm. I’m at work until 2:45pm. I’d get to class at 3:15pm and it ends at 4:15pm. Needless to say, I’d miss nearly two hours of lecture which I simply cannot afford to do.

Please don’t rag on lecture, this is not what this is about. It’s not up to us to decide how she wants to teach. The professor is a wonderful lady but is a bit older and she does things a certain way. Truth is, I like her classes, and I enjoy the lecture.

I’d like to capture video of the lecture but am not sure how to do it without it being a huge pain in the neck.

If the class were shorter I’d just give my Flip camera to someone, but it only holds an hour of footage.

If I’ll get there at 3:15, that’s an hour and 45 minutes. The other solution is a second Flip? I suppose that’s possible.

I have a few friends in the class so I could easily get them to set up cameras for me.

Anything better? Something simpler than two cameras?

Tagged with: flip • highered • lecture capture • mino
3 Comments »

Update: The problem was resolved by installing the Perian plugin. This answer was provided by a commenter. I am forever in her debt.

Now, I heard back from Pure Digital support just this morning. This means they violated their 4 hour turnaround time that they promised. Sad. Even more troubling is there response. In my note to them, listed below, I mentioned that I run Leopard and have the latest version of quicktime, right? Here’s a screenshot to prove it..

So, what do you think there response was? Here it is…

Dear Chris,

Thank you for contacting us.

We have recently become aware of an audio compatibility issue revolving around Flip Video and the QuickTime 7.4.5 update running on the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger operating system.

This issue should not affect customers running the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system.

Apple has released an updated version of QuickTime which resolves this issue. Please upgrade to QuickTime 7.5 to regain your audio.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Please do not hesitate to contact us for further assistance.

Thank you,
Flip Video Support

Obviously they did not read my original message, and that’s incredibly irritating. Shame on Pure Digital!

Original Post begins after this line…

So I just bought a Flip Mino camera. The trouble I am having is that when I import the video I get no sound. I emailed their tech support with this message.

Hello!

I purchased a Flip Mino yesterday and when I import videos onto my Mac, I get no sound. I hear sound if I play the video in the Flip for Mac application, but when I view the AVI in Quicktime, there is no sound. I tried importing into iMovie and there is still no sound. I tried playing the AVI in VLC Player and no sound either.

I saw the Q&A on this but I am running the very latest version of OS X Leopard (10.5.4) and have all the updates. I recently updated to iTunes 8 and Quicktime’s latest version, so it does not fit the mold of the question previously answered. Please don’t just copy and paste that Q&A to me.

Thanks for your help..

Chris

I am posting it here in the hopes that one of you has seen or heard of this and might offer a suggestion? I know this was an issue with Tiger at one point, but that doesn’t fit me. I tried the usual searches for answers and nothing. Any thoughts?

I’ll update this when they get back to me, supposedly within four hours. I emailed this around 10:00am EST on Saturday, Sept 13, 2008. Let’s see if they stand up to their promise…

Tagged with: flip mino • mino • pure digital • theflip
4 Comments »

I’m responding to Tim Wilson here, who touches on some very salient points regarding experts and novices.

My comment on his blog went like this…

Hi Tim,

I think the novices/expert distinction bears a bit more time here.

As novices gain expertise, the amount of cognitive load required for a particular activity lessens. As the behavior becomes automatized, the amount of load required lessens. Then, once expertise is gained the newly crowned expert can reinvest the extra cognitive load into other things.

The classic example is driving. Of course your recall how much you had to pay attention to the brake, gas, shifting, etc when you first started to drive. As that became more of a routine (automaticity was reached) you had to invest less load into driving and could focus on the other things like eating or talking on the phone. A bit silly, but you see the difference.

Take this in the classroom and a new teacher. The new teacher is at such a high level of cognitive load that he or she cannot focus on much more than lesson delivery. Once the behavior of delivering a lesson (for example) becomes more automatized he or she can then reinvest the load into more effective behavior management, etc. That’s why teachers who have been in the classroom for a long time (experts, veteran teachers) seem to have eyes in the back of their heads. The truth behind that is that they are investing load in watching students while the lesson delivery is automatized.

As for proven techniques, from a cognitive load perspective (Sweller, Kalyuga, Feldon, Ayers, Van Merrionboer and others) in order to accelerate that continuum as you say, one must practice. It is only when behavior becomes automatized can the extra load be reinvested in other things.

How does this help a new teacher? He or she should practice classroom routines ad nauseum. Not necessarily with students, but they need to be down. Everything from attendance to transitions to where to put stuff and so on. This way he or she can focus on lessons and students effectively lowering load.

There was an excellent article that speaks directly to this. It’s called Cognitive Load in the Classroom, the Double Edged Sword of Automaticity. Here is the citation, devour it and you’ll see the research behind what you think here intuitively.

Here is the link, but it’s in Educational Psychologist, so you’ll need journal access.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a788087732~db=all

or

http://tinyurl.com/62blhh

If you don’t have access, email me and I will send it to you (with the author’s permission, which I have).

Hope this helps..

Chris

Your thoughts?

2 Comments »

Slideshare’s presentation tennis group has chosen one of my slides for their daily choice.

To see all of the daily picks (and the first four or five were done professionally, and I was day 6!) click here.

Here’s the announcement…

I think they chose mine because it makes for a nice transition between the professionally designed ones to the community designed ones.

Also please note that I did attribute the photo (it’s from stock xchng which doesn’t require an on-slide attribution) when I uploaded it.

Here’s the slide…it’s for my first day teaching undergrads and it’s time for them to introduce themselves.

Here’s the entire slidedeck thus far.

2 Comments »